historicize the Koran!

"To historicize the Koran would in effect delegitimize the whole historical experience of the Muslim community," says R Stephen Humphreys, a professor of Islamic studies at the University of California at Santa Barbara. "The Koran is the charter for the community, the document that called it into existence. And ideally - though obviously not always in reality - Islamic history has been the effort to pursue and work out the commandments of the Koran in human life. If the Koran is a historical document, then the whole Islamic struggle of 14 centuries is effectively meaningless."